by Annie Proulx
There was a sink, an unscreened toilet in the corner of the tiny room, an alcove like a niche in the wall with a dripping showerhead and an orange-flowered mildewed plastic curtain, a three-quarter bed, and jammed into the space between the side of the bed and the wall, a grocery shopping cart. She couldn’t figure out what it was doing there until she saw it was made up like a bed, with a folded blanket for a mattress. No television. She knew better than to say anything. She went out and got Florry and Artie. Put them both on the bed. Joey threw himself down on the swaybacked mattress, next to the children; the bed squeaked like a lunatic.
“Howsa wittle baby, howsa wittle girl,” he said, tickling Florry. She sat up, squirming, he pushed her over, tickling, and as she got to her hands and knees she suddenly vomited and started to bawl.
(Twenty years later, the Isuzu commercial wrapped, Florry snapped the lid on her electronic hybrid MIDI-retrofitted Petosa with sixteen channels, Hall-effect magnetic switches, after-touch, dynamic bellows control, key velocity for bass and treble, tempo control, transposition capability and movable keyboard splits, nodded at Bunny Baller the engineer—a bad case of razor bumps, goateed, hair-netted—out of his booth and swigging a bottle of Evian, the drops sparkling down his mesh shirt, and pulled on her patent-leather coat, heard Tommy the producer say, that was some well-played shit, and she said, yeah, but Miss Platinum’s got a salivating problem, you gotta get that spit out of there, and he said, don’t worry, but she was out the door looking at her watch, looking for what came next with a terrific headache and that swimmy, fevery feeling again, the flu? Walked to her silver Camry, got in and leaned forward to turn the ignition key when something fell from the cloudless sky with force, hit the hood hard enough to rock the car and broke into three large fragments. She got out and picked up one of the pieces. Pizza—frozen pizza—what, somebody threw it out of an airplane? A message from God?)
“For chrissake,” he said. “We’re in the room two minutes and the pukin brat wrecks the place. CLEAN YOUR KID UP!” he shouted at her, heaving himself off the bed. He went out to the car.
It had probably already happened back at the diner, maybe even before, but it could have happened in those minutes in the motel room.
“You couldn’t hold it, could you?” she whispered furiously at the child, bending her roughly over the toilet while she retched. She heard him slamming the car doors, heard the lid of the trunk go up with a loud squeak. The motel walls were like paper. He’d bought the car from a dealer in revitalized wrecks; the frame was a little bent, the doors and trunk squealed, the tires wore on one side, but he’d got it cheap. He was back in the room before she got the bed cleaned up.
“Did you bring in the accordions? DID YOU BRING IN THE ACCORDIONS?”
She shook her head. He was frightened, she heard it.
“They’re not in the trunk. They’re not in the FUCKIN TRUNK.” He looked under the bed, ran out and began throwing everything in the car on the ground—the kids’ blankets, maps, crumpled bags, her suitcase, the box of diapers. He went back to the trunk and opened it again, as if the accordions might have reappeared, perhaps back from a stroll around the block. He got in the driver’s seat, the place he always sat, the only place where he was in control of things. He tried to think. Went back into the room.
“I put them in, I put them both in, it was the last thing I did, I remember checking the catch on yours right there in the trunk—it comes undone.”
“Yeah.”
“Look. If I find out you did something with those accordions I’m going to kill you.”
“How could I do anything with them? I been right where you are since we left.”
“Yeah? How about in the diner? When I was finishin my coffee you went out. You were out there. You could of taken them out and shoved them under the car. I’d take off and never notice. Did you do that? DID YOU DO THAT?” He clamped her chin in his heavy hand, twisted her head toward him. She couldn’t help it, tears spilled down her face. He made her look at him. She couldn’t talk because her mouth was distorted.
“Mo. ’idn’t touch ’em.”
“Tell you what you did do. You couldn’t wait in the car while I was getting the coffee, could you? You knew the fuckin trunk didn’t lock, you knew those valuable accordions were in there, worth a couple grand each. But you left ’em unattended, just came on in, couldn’t let me out of your sight. What’d you think I was gonna do, bang that waitress with the face like a baboon behind the counter? You left the car unattended so any son-of-a-bitch could come along and open the trunk and see what was in there. The guy must have shit his pants when he saw those accordions, he must have said, ‘oh Lorda Mussy, dis be mah lucky day!’ Some fuckin nigger took them accordions, one under each arm, and run down the street. Bet he watched us drive away, bet he laughed until he pissed his pants, laughin how he put one over on us.” His voice was taut. He was crimped with rage. He went out, leaving the door open. She heard his voice through the wall, talking to the motel manager. He came back into the room.
“What was the name of that diner? You better remember what town it was in. I’m gonna call the cops there and tell them some coon swamphopper ripped off my accordions. Then I’m goin out and find two goddamn accordions we can play tonight.” He looked at his watch.
“It’s quarter of four. You be ready at seven-thirty and have my clothes out.” He dropped the suitcase on the bed. “I’m comin back with two accordions if I have to steal ’em myself.”
“Can’t we borrow from the guys that’ll be playin?”
He was out the door, didn’t hear her. Bulling through the problems like always, even when there was a simple way. “Those are good guys. Wally’d let us use his, he always brings two. Eddie and Bonnie be glad to.”
She studied the veiny map, the thruway a main blood vessel pulsing down the state, and the vein roads leading away east and west and then branching out into fine capillaries that ended in small towns. She thought about the morning, packing and getting ready to leave, tried to remember seeing him bring the accordions out. She’d gone over to the apartment window where Florry was watching the street, looked down. Their car was there, the trunk closed, Joey walking back to the apartment building with that heel-banging stride. Across the street, in front of the Stretch-Yor-Bucks, a bread truck, behind it an old Cadillac idling, a spew of oily smoke gushing from the tailpipe and the swarthy driver drawing on his cigarette. Two women in long print skirts came out of the grocery store. “Look, Florry, there’s gypsies.”
“Where? Where are they? Do they bite?”
“They’re people, silly, they don’t bite—what do you think?”
But the door banged and Joey had yelled, “come on, let’s go, we’re ready to roll.”
She thought about asking the manager, Margie, to keep an eye on the kids while she went over to the performance hall, explained the problem, see if anybody could help them out. But didn’t dare.
Pawnshops
It was getting colder. The digital temperature readout on a bank facade, “8° F.” Filmy snow came down like mist, he could see advancing waves. The light was fading, streetlights came on, neon signs. He put on his headlights. His breath froze on the inside of the windshield and he had to keep scraping it with the kitchen spatula, little curls of frost showering down. He’d ripped two pages out of the phone directory and kept squinting at them when he pulled up at a red light. The traffic was stop and go. He saw an empty place, nosed the car into a taxi stand, left it running to show he’d be only a minute, then came back and turned it off, put the key in his pocket. Somebody steal that, he was up shit creek with a balloon in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other.
The door was locked, there was steel mesh over it and a sign that said “Go to Window and Buzz.”
“Buzz, buzz,” he said aloud, but at the security window pressed the buzzer.
“Yes?” said a voice. “State your business, please.”
“I’m looking to rent two accord
ions. Somebody ripped off my accordions and I got to play a contest tonight so I’m in a spot. I’m looking for two accordions.”
“Read the sign, mister. Gold and silver, coins. I don’t deal in accordions. Try up two blocks, at American Investment. He’s got accordions. He’s got trumpets. Guitars.”
“OK.” He was back in the car, nosing out into the traffic again, the headlights catching in the damn frost his breath made so he could barely see out the windshield. He went past the hall where the contest was going to be. The lights were blazing, a big red and white misspelled banner strung across the front, NAZDROWIE! 1970 POLISH POLKA PLAYOFFS TONITE. There was a list of players, headliners in big red letters with a white star for a dot over the letter i: Walt Solek, Mrozinski Bros., The Connecticut Twins—shit, they didn’t count for shit in Chicago—Tubby Kupski, Big Marky, Happy Gals, and got a glimpse of his own name in pretty good-size letters, Joey & Sonia Newcomer. They had everybody but Frankie Yankovic, probably thought he was too big for this. Slovene anyway, not Polish, a buttonbox guy with a taste for the banjo. He wasn’t worried. Most of the ones in the duet class were a bunch of pretzel benders, they didn’t have his sound. Except for the Bartosik Brothers who were extremely good and extremely dangerous. They’d taken a big one from them in Gary with a novelty arrangement of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” in the styles of Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys. They were bastards.
American Investment & Pawn was big, and the gold and silver guy was right, he could see accordions from the car, Christ, looking at a wall of them. This time he was lucky, caught a parking place as a truck pulled away. There was a crooked poster in the window: ENJOYING LIFE? YOU’LL REALLY ENJOY IT WITH AN ACCORDION!
The woman behind the counter was built like a football tackle, hard face made of suet. He gave her the song and dance about the accordions being ripped off. She didn’t say a word; the look on her face said it all: I don’t believe a fuckin word. But he read her like a newspaper. She had the genes, the look, of his grandmother.
“Look,” he said as if talking to a dummy, but keeping his voice patient, “my wife and me, we’re Polish, we got a act, a real good act, and we play in the contests. Duet polkas and she sings. We got three tapes out. There’s the big contest here tonight, down at the armory, a polka playoff, and we got a very, very good chance of taking the first prize for mixed couple duet, a thousand bucks. I’m not shittin you. Some diner up the road, a couple a jigaboos broke in the car while we was takin our sick kids to the toilet and stole our accordions, we didn’t even know it until we got to the motel.” He let a little emotion get in there, let his voice break a little bit.
She said something to him in Polish. He smiled, hiding his quick rage.
“I don’t talk Polish, just picked up a couple words from my grandmother. Na zdrowie. You know.” He sighed. “It’s a shame, ain’t it, how the generation lost the language. I’d love to know it but—” He spread his hands in despair.
The woman shrugged, pointed at the accordions with her thumb. He wanted to look at accordions why go through the song and dance? He was going to try something funny, she knew it.
“Let me see that green one. Up there.” It had to be on the top shelf. She slid the rail ladder over, climbed up, watching him under her arm in case he tried anything funny. His eyes were moving over the accordions, not the cash register. Maybe he was on the level, maybe not. Came down with the accordion and set it on the counter. Dusty.
He didn’t know why he’d asked her to get this one; it was a button accordion, not a piano accordion. Neither one of them could play the damn thing except Sonia, a little. Her old man was a crazy man on the buttonbox, had started her out that way. He examined it, an old instrument, too old and too small. Leather bellows and still supple despite the dust. He picked it up and made a couple of chords, set it back on the counter, looked at the shelves of melodeons, Cajun open-valved diatonics, big square Chemnitzers, English and Anglo concertinas, a small single-voice bandoneon, electric piano accordions, Yugoslavian melodijas, plastic accordions, a Chinese mudan, a bayan from Russia, two Pakistani harmoniums, and row after row of Bastaris, Castigliones, Sopranis, Hohner Black Dots—god, look at them all, every immigrant in America must have pawned an accordion here, chrome Italian names curling along the cracked lacquer and celluloid and wood, Colombo, an Italotone, the Sonda, the Renelli, a Duralumin shaped like a harp, who’d play that?, big chromatics with their five-tier stacks of keys a nightmare to learn, over there a lone Bassetti like the jazz guy Leon Sash played, and Bach, he played Bach too, you could do that with an accordion.
“Let me see that Colombo polka model, the black one there, that’s actually what we play, piano accordions. Put this buttonbox back—I must of thought this was a piano accordion up there in the shadows.” The woman brought him the big Colombo. He could see there were five or six on the shelf. He tried them, one after another, most of them messed up in some way, stuck keys or the reeds bad, bellows leaky or the action stiff. There was a Guerrini polka box with Slovenian tuning; he didn’t want that.
At last he got it down to three. They could play these, and he pushed back the thought that it could be hard to win with them. He rattled out a fast minute of “Money Money Polka,” showing off their style, that wild honkying minor, a barbarian tension, the feeling of being on the edge of losing control that made their sound, which nobody else had, that made dancers go crazy. Looked at the woman to gauge her reaction; she looked surprised in a sour way. He grinned at her, pouring on the charm.
“Guess you can play, all right,” she said.
Now beef up the sob story, and make a deal with the old bitch.
Getting ready
The kids were asleep, Florry in the bed, Artie in the shopping cart, when he came in, and Sonia was leaning at the mirror, dabbing on her makeup, bare legs showing beneath her bathrobe. Their clothes were hanging on the back of the door, not a wrinkle in them.
“Got ’em,” he said, slapped her on the rump. “It’s only six o’clock.” He cracked open a beer, took a pint of V.O. from his jacket pocket. “Wanna shot?”
“Yeah. They any good?” Looking at the instruments. Big old black things, they wouldn’t go with their costumes. She picked up one of the Colombos and played a little, ran through the opening chords of their old novelty ethnic number that they didn’t use anymore, “Dyngus Day Drinkin’,” where the music got progressively sillier and looser and he mimed putting down the shots with beer chasers, then he switched at her legs with imaginary pussy willows and she jumped, still playing the accordion, did a big bellows shake. The tone wasn’t lively and she could hardly jump, the instrument was so heavy. Anyway, they’d dropped that number for a complicated medley of tricky rhythms and familiar tunes. Joey knew that winning duets stayed away from weird stuff, gave the audience something familiar and comfortable yet played fast with a lot of tricks: “Love Ya,” “Happy Us,” “Wonderful Times,” “My Happy Baby.” She thought of their lost instruments, Norwegian spruce soundboards, handmade reeds, the grilles cut out in their names.
“It’s heavy,” she said. “It sounds muddy.” She tried the other instrument. It was a little better, maybe, but one of the keys was loose and made a clack every time she hit it. She wanted her blue accordion. Actually it was his; he’d gone to court against his brother over it when old Hieronim/Harry died. The old man left only one accordion and both of them wanted it, but Rajmund could hardly play and Joey got a cheap lawyer to make the case that the one who could play should have it. Rajmund just wanted to sell it and have the money. He’d do anything for money, but things went against him. Those long arms like an ape. He’d grabbed a package of bills, three tall stacks packed close and bound with a brown paper wrapper, from the woman behind the check approval counter at the Kmart, did it on impulse, all that money and her just standing there with it, trying to hold open a canvas bag with the other hand. He ran out. But in the parking lot the package blew apart, sending out a big cloud of red dye that got all
over him, up his nose and all over his face and neck. He dropped the money and ran to his old maroon van, but there was a cloud of red floating behind him and red all over the van where he touched it, and the engine wouldn’t turn over.
Now in the hot-bed motel Joey started the salty comic piece “What’s That Thing Between Us?” and their voices fitted together, hers husky and full, his reedy tenor surprisingly pure and high from that heavy chest, so that she carried the melody and he took the harmony. It was OK and she relaxed. Maybe they’d pull it off. The voices counted for a lot. She started to practice the runs, hating the loose key, sipping at his boilermaker. He played better when he was a little drunk. So did she. And it made it easier to drink the liniment mixture.
“You rent them?” she said.
“I made a deal. Don’t worry, it’s OK. You think of the name of that diner? And the town it was at? I’m getting those accordions back, don’t care what I do.”
“I looked on the map. It must of been Morley, because I remember it was after that long road with nothin on it, then we come to this town. But I didn’t see the name on the diner.”
He gave her a disgusted look. “What the hell good are you? Tell you one thing, we’re gonna pull out of here tomorrow morning and spend the day in fuckin Morley until I find the guy that took ’em, then I’m gonna run over the black bastard until he turns into strawberry jam.” He took a hard belt of the whiskey and smacked the glass down.
“OK, get it over with. Get the stuff.” She got the bottle of Dr. Jopes Red Rock Healing Liniment, with the silhouettes of horses galloping across the label. Joey measured a capful into her glass and topped it up with beer.
“Drink it slow so it can take effect.”
“Don’t worry!” The bitter, corrosive sensation began with the second swallow and her vocal cords tightened. When the glass was empty her mouth and throat were dry.
“Enough? Or do you need more?” He was hard about the liniment bottle.